In their youth, many people feel the urge to invest their excess energy into bequeathing a better world to future generations. Having just reached 86, I have discovered the downside - live long enough and you get to meet the future generations and hear the challenge: "What on earth did you think you were up to? This is not the utopian world you told us to expect. What went wrong? You didn't really believe, did you, that the world was suddenly getting nicer?"

Well, actually, we did. In the 60s and 70s, a crucial shift was certainly taking place. For the first time, significant numbers of black people and women and gay people and provincials and the underprivileged were all loudly refusing to know their place in the scheme of things. They claimed that black was beautiful, sisterhood was powerful, gays were proud, Liverpool was as vibrant as London, and serious attention was being paid to sentiments not articulated in the Queen's English.

I was a feminist and in 1972 wrote a book called The Descent of Woman at roughly the same time that Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch. My approach was Darwinian. I disagreed with many evolutionists of the time because I couldn't believe that natural selection, in moulding the human race, had been concentrating solely on the requirements of Man the Mighty Hunter - even where they might conflict with the interests of his mate and his offspring. But many other feminists rejected Darwinism outright. Extremist groups such as Scum (the Society for Cutting Up Men) were enabling cartoonists to create a stereotype of women's liberationists as bra-burning, man-hating viragos and advancing arguments I couldn't agree with.

One was the allegation that all the world's "shitwork" (cleaning the lavatory, changing the nappies) is done by women, while men have pleasant, prestigious careers outside the home. Living in a mining area, I felt that, as jobs go, working at the coal face was one of the shittiest, with little career structure to speak of.

But what made me really anomalous among women's libbers was that, at 52, I was as old as their mothers - and their mothers were regarded as traitors, collaborators with the enemy, having played along with the nuclear-family rigmarole by acquiring a hubby, a few kiddy-winkies, and all that crap. (I was guilty on all counts.) They were splendid young women, free and untrammelled, striding into the future with the wind in their hair and everything to play for.

The blessing of the women's movement, though, was that compared with male equivalents it was far less likely to give rise to thought-police and personality cults. (Can you think of any predominantly male campaign as influential as Greenham Common, where so few people can name even one of the instigators?) So I was accepted as at least a fellow traveller. To that extent I must stand in the dock when the question is raised: "What went wrong?"

First, let's not forget what went right. Compared with 50 years ago, women are immeasurably better off - psychologically freer, more confident and self-reliant, economically more independent. We don't have equal pay yet but we have moved closer to it. Women haven't crashed through the glass ceiling of most boardrooms, but we are no longer confined to taking dictation and making the coffee.

Women still constitute the majority of carers - the most under-regarded and worst-paid job in the economy - and that needs to be tackled.

But what really went wrong is this. Everyone agreed that women should be free to work outside the home if we chose. We didn't foresee that that would gradually morph into the obligation to do it, whether we wanted to or not. A world-famous economist once defined women's role in the economy as "facilitating consumption" (ie, shopping). We have now become an indispensable part of the productive workforce in a shorter time than anyone predicted. That is OK up to a point. Most aspects of running a house have been transformed by technology (washing machines, central heating and so on) or farmed out to commercial providers - fast-food producers, supermarkets, restaurants etc.

But raising children is one service that cannot be improved by mechanisation. What has happened is that, collectively, employers have doubled the size of the workforce by hijacking long hours of parental time that used to be devoted to the children. Mothers return to work sooner than they wish because almost all consumer products - from food and drink to mortgages and sofas - are now geared to the assumption that the consumer is either childless or part of a two-wage family. On the birth of a child, the sudden contraction to being a one-wage family is often considered unsupportable for any length of time. The cost of creating the economic miracle has been disproportionately borne by the children.

So where do we go from here? I'm not advocating a return to the doctrines derived from (a misreading of) John Bowlby - that a child's well-being can be shattered by the lack of 24-hour care by its own mother. It doesn't necessarily have to be Mum-and-Dad, either. It can be done by somebody else for part of the time. But every child needs more than one-20th of the attention of the someone else. This care cannot be governed by the cost-cutting principles of the open market. A lot more of the GDP generated by the doubling of the workforce should be deliberately channelled downwards towards the lowest age group - young children. Some measures could include higher family allowances, much longer periods of paid leave for a parent (either father or mother) on the birth of a child, more creches at workplaces, a higher stipulated ratio of adults to children in all nurseries, more consideration of the needs of mothers in public places. The Nordic countries are zealous and imaginative in promoting these benefits and every piece of research so far confirms that people in those countries are happier and live longer.

There is one political point to be made here. Conservative demagogues are currently deploring the breakdown of marriage until death and the loosening of extended family ties, and implying that this trend can be reversed by pious exhortations to right thinking. The fact is that market forces are continuing to suck women out of their homes and no amount of preaching can push them back in again as long as the dictates of unrestricted competition are regarded as sacrosanct.